June 24, 2004
Time was, Condoleezza Rice was admonishing the North Koreans -- who were
offering to dismantle their nuclear programme in exchange for food aid --
that the United States would not be victimised by Korean bribery.
Condi and friends are now whistling a different tune:
Seeking to persuade North Korea to abandon its threat to produce nuclear
weapons, the Bush administration yesterday for the first time handed the
North a detailed proposal promising an aid package and a guarantee not to
attack in exchange for a commitment to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Now, any reason the Bush Administration couldn't have offered to lift Iraq's
sanctions had Saddam "in exchange" offered a "commitment to abandon its
nuclear ambitions"?
Well, maybe because the Bush Administration (like the Clinton Administration
before it) was well aware that Saddam had long since abandoned his nuclear
(and other banned weapons) ambitions, not to mention the weapons
themselves -- if only because he knew that it was a fool's game to try to
out-gun the Israelis and the Americans.
Given the Bush Administration's latest about-face, can there be any doubt
whatsoever that the Administration had absolutely zero expectations of
finding any sign of an extant banned weapons programme in Iraq?
Good ol' Scottie McClellan is keeping a stiff upper-lip, anyway: "One way to
look at this is to look at the Libya model. Good-faith action on North
Korea's part will be met with good-faith response by the other parties."
No doubt the U.S. will soon be making a similar "good-faith" offer to
Iran -- which, it was reported a few months ago, "could be unstoppably on
its way to producing nuclear material for its own bombs" as soon as this
summer.
So if the Bush Administration can offer "good-faith" negotiations with two
of the three charter members of the Axis Of Evil club, why not with the
third? (Of course, it's probably now wishing it had done.)
Simple: it saw Iraq as entirely defenceless. In other words, having disarmed
at least eight years prior to Bush's merry war, it had nothing of value to
offer in return -- save perhaps an oil concession, which the Bush
Administration preferred to take outright.
Given that it was a country with a military budget 400 times smaller than
the United States', with no weapons of mass destruction to its name, and
reeling from a decade of the most punitive sanctions regime in history;
stealing Iraq's oil should have been as easy as the proverbial taking of
candy from an infant.
Instead, the battered, bruised, and beleaguered Iraqis have stalemated and
crippled the U.S. military. (Retired General Barry McCaffrey goes even
further: "The Army is accelerating downhill at the moment, and if the course
isn't changed, we could damage it significantly or even break it in the next
five years.")
The "good-faith" offer to Iran is thus probably a foregone conclusion.
Begging the question, how soon 'til the United States makes a "good-faith"
offer to bin Laden, marking the official collapse of the "War On Terror" (a
topic to which this blogger will return in the near future)?
And, natch, how deftly will Limbaugh and McClellan be able to spin the
ignominious grovelling at the feet of the gooks and the towel-heads?
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